Welcome back to the Treble World Tour, a series of Top 10s covering albums that best represent certain locations—cities, states, territories, even entire nations. We consider representative releases on three levels: They were made by artists from a place, they contain music about or inspired by the place, and/or they were made in that place. This month, we began the heavy lifting of surveying the music that represents New York City, borough by borough, starting with Manhattan and then last week, The Bronx. Today, we head across the East River to Brooklyn, hipster haven and melting pot for a variety of different styles and sounds. Today we know Brooklyn as the home of countless indie rock bands, Michelin star restaurants and gentrification. But that’s not necessarily the Brooklyn that Sonny Rollins knew, or that Biggie and Jay-Z knew. In fact, it’s hard to summarize the most populous borough in New York City, with a population larger than all but about four cities in the U.S., but that vast community and its diversity is what makes Brooklyn such an artistic hub, from jazz to folk and rock to hip-hop and even experimental electronic music. These 10 albums are all from artists who have known Brooklyn as home, but they’re also made by artists whose view from across the river has shaped their music in sometimes unusual ways. Our list of essential Brooklyn albums comprises half a century of artistic innovation and neighborhood pride.
(1988; Bar/None)
John Linnell and John Flansburgh have managed a long career of 35-plus years because, novelty origins and orgies of puns be damned, their material has almost always been about something. It’s almost as if They Might Be Giants used their convulsive mangling of pan-American kitsch and studied pop songwriting to weed out those who’d already made up their minds to pass them by, just so those who’d give them an inch could mine their casual profundities in peace. Lincoln, their second album, pared some of the wild edges of their debut. They still took a poniard to the industrially optimistic music of the 20th century with guitar, accordion, synth-bass and the leaden, godforsaken Alesis HR-16 drum machine on “Cowtown,” “Purple Toupee,” “Cage & Aquarium” and “Shoehorn with Teeth.” But there’s no disavowing the propulsive sadness of “Ana Ng,” the drunken hallucination of “Lie Still, Little Bottle,” the disoriented metrosexuals of “They’ll Need a Crane” or the juking paranoia of “Where Your Eyes Don’t Go.” Breezing through 20 songs in less than 40 minutes, TMBG fully earn the right to be the tyrannical cult leaders depicted in the final song, “Kiss Me, Son of God.” It’s Brooklyn. You do what you have to do.